The Kyoto Prize dinner was last week and, as usual, it was quite a nice time. We've attended this the last 3 years. Long evening but great food and entertainment, including an 11!-yr old girl who played Chopin’s Fantasy in C# Minor. She’s already debuted with the Shanghai Symphony and other notable groups. And she had a delightful personality, too! A group with those big Oriental drums played, also, and we had a singer and dancing couple. Fun!

I missed talking to Ryan before he left on this trip because I got too engrossed in a medical show on hypothermic cardiac arrest, where drs cool your blood so low that your heart stops, so they can repair, for example, brain aneurysms. You are clinically dead for 15-20 minutes, then they warm your blood and your heart usually starts beating spontaneously (or they shock it). One of the young women who underwent this procedure had a near-death experience where she "popped out" of her body and could tell the doctor, later, what was going on elsewhere in the room; then she saw a light which grew brighter and brighter and her grandmother came to her and told her that she would be going back, which she soon did. Pretty interesting! The doctor said that with the brain that cold and metabolic activity so slow, he couldn't imagine that the brain could generate those images. Pretty amazing, huh!